Author
Topic: Map: British Isles 2440x3816 (Read 8904 times)

I've had this heightmap around for some time now, it covers the United Kingdom, Ireland, Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, along with part of France and maybe even a small section of Belgium. Paris is more or less in the south east corner of the map - so Eurostar operations are possible! Not sure if I ever released a previous version, however this is much improved, with a more accurate coastline and a greater number of height levels. I've tested this with double heights and the "variable beaches" currently part of per-climate-tiles, however it will work in standard simutrans (just not exactly as intended). Water height should be set to -6.

Nice map. I had some thoughts about it. There quite a lot of sea around, which does not increase the fun by playing that much. Ok, I know, this is a specific British Problem, but anyway... ; - )

I thought how to increase the land part of that map without having a too huge map. So I did the following:

1. I turned Britain around by 20 degress. I do hope wholeheartely that Her Majesty will forgive me.This allowed me to cut a relevant amount of sea on all sides.

2. I shrinked the West of Ireland by some 150 px, as there not that much big cities, industries and traffic systems. Any Irishmen which fell offended by that should ping me when meeting me in a bar. We will clear that problem over some beers.

3. I shrinked the north of Scotland by some 100 px. Well, Scotsmen, no way to solve it the Irish way, as I don't drink Whisky.

4. As the Eurostar seems senceless without serving people on the continent, I added a simplified, manipulated version of the French coast, whereas a part of it moved to the north. Now we have a real channel and space for some French cities. I am sure, the Bretones wouldn't claim, as their erea is even bigger now.

5. I scaled the ppm to 2560 by 3813 px, which is almost the original size, but with some 20% more land in width and height.

I hope that might increase the fun. Feel free to go on improving it. I am missing this nice river through London, btw.

I did consider rotation however when preserving scale it doesn't give that great an increase in area (note that quite a bit of the increase you've achieved is by not including Shetland). Also I spent some considerable time tidying up the coastline, a quick rotation will probably need tidying up also - at a glance there's a lot of aliasing artifacts around the coastline on your version.

Nevertheless, different people play in different ways and I'm sure for some players this will be an improvement

Some of the artifacts here are probably due to the upscaling that rainer mentioned, too. If you're using GIMP, I recommend setting interpolation to "none" for rotation and scaling, since this will avoid most of these artifacts.